Integrating deep learning in target tracking applications, as enabler of control systems

Target tracking is a key component of control systems with applications in various domains. Several examples of commercial applications may be given, which benefit from this technology: the development of car collision avoidance systems which must detect and track potential obstacles and hazards, or the development of UAVs that can track and record the evolution of athletes. For the purpose of our research, this technology was developed and tested as part of a less complex application. The current work describes a simple yet practical implementation of vision-based control for a mobile robot system. In the experiment, we used a mobile robot as target and a similar robot as follower. To achieve the tracking task, the used strategy involves the detection of a specific visual object mounted on the target, by extracting its features which are then used in issuing control commands within a remotely-closed loop. A Deep Learning approach is used for object detection, incorporating a detector model into the strategy while preserving an explicit controller in the overall scheme. The carried experiment has proven that this new approach provides the expected results, which make it a suitable tool for development of larger scale applications of control systems.